Over the past five years, the fund has returned an average of 16.3% annually, better than 96% of all world stock funds tracked by Morningstar.

The prospectus benchmark for the fund is the MSCI ACWI Index. One of the low-cost implementations of this index is the iShares MSCI ACWI ETF (ACWI). Alpholio™’s calculations show that since inception the fund returned more than the ETF in 88% of all rolling 36-month periods, 89% of 24-month periods and 62% of 12-month periods.

The median cumulative (not annualized) return difference over a rolling 36-month period was close to 16.8%.

A rolling returns comparison focuses on relative returns over typical holding periods, but ignores the fund’s volatility and exposures. To account for the latter, let’s employ the simplest variant of Alpholio™’s patented methodology. This approach constructs a reference ETF portfolio that most closely tracks periodic returns of the fund. Both the ETF membership and weights in the reference portfolio are fixed over the analysis interval. To make the implementation practical, the number of ETFs in the reference portfolio may be limited, e.g. to five in this analysis.

Here is the resulting chart with statistics of the cumulative RealAlpha™ for Prudential Jennison Global Opportunities (to learn more about this and other performance measures, please consult our FAQ):

The fund significantly underperformed its reference ETF portfolio in terms of both a lower cumulative return and higher volatility.

The following chart with associated statistics depicts the constant composition of the reference ETF portfolio for the fund over the same evaluation period:

Clearly, the fund was heavily tilted toward the information- and bio-technology sectors. This explains its substantial outperformance vs. the broad-based ACWI index in the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). This also demonstrates how a seemingly well-diversified fund can create undesirable excessive exposures in the overall investment portfolio (note the relatively low R-squared).

In sum, the Prudential Jennison Global Opportunities Fund failed to add value over the reference ETF portfolio that adjusted for its sector exposures. The steep front load further made the fund less attractive. Despite a substantial turnover, the fund did not have any distributions since inception, which made it suitable for taxable accounts.

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